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Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

I love using modern teflon non-stick. It's so much easier to clean and handle than cast iron. Sure, it doesn't last as long, but who cares if I have to buy another one for $20 in 3 years? (That's how long mine has lasted so far.) For 90% of cooking it works amazingly well. No worries about seasoning, if someone accidentally uses soap on it or whatever. Life is too short to spend babying a pan. I use my cast iron for steaks and as a pizza steel, though the steaks don't compare to flame-grilled.

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I love using modern cast iron. It's so much easier to clean and handle than teflon non-stick (I freely use metal scrubbers and utensils). Sure, I don't have to worry about ingesting forever chemicals in my body, but who cares if I have to buy another one for $3 in 20 years? (That's how long mine has lasted so far.) For 90% of cooking it works amazingly well. No worries about seasoning, if someone accidentally uses soap on it or whatever. Life is too short to spend babying a teflon pan with wooden and plastic utensils. I use my cast iron for everything.

I hardly worry about the seasoning of my cast iron skillets. I cook eggs in my 8" cast iron skillet most of the days of the week. I've had these pans for decades. Someone accidentally using dish soap isn't going to take off the seasoning. Stripping off the seasoning is a lot more work than that. Just keep the tomato sauce out of them.

I usually clean stuck on food by throwing a bunch of salt in the pan with a little water. Just the right level of abrasion with a sponge. Dry and wipe down with some oil.

I find once well seasoned cooking tomatoes or other acidic foods once in a while does basically nothing to the seasoning. Just fry some bacon in it after.

> Life is too short to spend babying a pan.

Strangely enough, this is a good reason for preferring cast iron over Teflon! Cast iron is close to indestructible, whereas with PTFE or other non-stick coatings one is constantly worried about scratching.

Soap is fine on a cast-iron pan. Despite what people always say about non-stick, I don't find cast-iron and teflon to be really comparable. The reason I'd use cast-iron is because I want steady, even heating, want to develop a fond (which is difficult in teflon), etc. But no matter how good the seasoning I put on cast iron it's always going to suck for eggs unless I use a ton of oil.

I have no trouble with fried eggs or an omelet in my cast iron. I use a tiny bit of ghee, but a small pat of butter would work fine too. We also make a Spanish tortilla in our cast iron. That sticks just a little bit at the end.

I learned recently that adding a tablespoon of water and covering the egg has helped immensely. The water lifts up the egg, steams under the cover and heats from all sides of the egg quick enough to avoid the egg adhering.

You don't need a tonne of oil, you need to make sure you don't add the oil until the pan is good and hot. Maybe a tbsp. And if you flip your eggs, you'll have to add a bit more oil before doing so.

Other (non-mandatory) egg-in-cast-iron advice: use a stainless steel fish flipper (very thin and flexible). For me, if I want the top a bit more cooked, I do the tbsp water + lid trick to finish it off.

When I was a young man, nearly 50 years ago, I worked as a trainee with a cook who did something somewhat similar. He would cook one side of the eggs in a small egg pan, and then slide them onto a large dark leaf of lettuce (romaine?) placed on the grill (a flat smooth affair, not a grate). The egg and the lettuce were then covered with a cheap pie tin -- the type one gets when buying a pie to take home from the restaurant.

I suspect the goal was to stop the bottom from over cooking (insulate it) and perhaps generate a bit of steam to help with setting the top of the eggs slightly. The goal was perfect sunny-side up eggs as best I recall. Seems like it would work just as well with all steps done in a cast iron pan?

Interesting - should certainly work just as well in cast iron!

Was the lettuce served with the egg as well, or just discarded? I could see either - as you say, providing just a bit of insulation and moisture to finish cooking the top without overcooking the bottom.

He just discarded it. It wasn't a fancy restaurant, though some of the cooks had fine dining experience.

Use butter not oil for eggs. It won’t stick.

Add butter to pan, let pan heat up, add eggs, turn off flame. Perfect eggs every time and it never sticks.

> Sure, it doesn't last as long

It actually lasts forever, depending how you look at it

It'll only last your forever once it's in your lungs.

> Sure, it doesn't last as long, but who cares if I have to buy another one for $20 in 3 years?

That's the main reason I own only cast iron. I like to buy things once and keep them forever. It's really not that much of a pain to use. I've never seasoned or otherwise serviced my cast iron in 8 years of use. It's heavy and a bit more tedious to clean without using soap. But I've never had to throw out or buy another pan, and it feels good to be using something you know will last for the rest of your life.

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